Art critic Alastair Sooke gives his verdict on a set of portraits of
world leaders, including Tony Blair, painted by former US president George W
Bush

It is notoriously hard to judge the merits of a painter without seeing his work at first-hand – unless the artist in question happens to be George W Bush. Since stepping down as America’s 43rd president in 2009, “Dubya” has occupied himself with learning how to paint. And when some of his pictures, including two extravagantly bizarre self-portraits of himself in his bathroom, were leaked online last year, his idiosyncratically naïve and skew-whiff style was plain for all to see.

It turns out that, whether artfully or not, Bush paints in a similar fashion to the way he talks – affecting a folksy, homespun, plain-speaking tone, with just enough ham-fisted strangeness and bungling missteps to keep things interesting. In fact, Bush’s paintings exhibit many of the hallmarks of so-called “outsider art” – which, as visitors to last summer’s Venice Biennale will know, is very modish at the moment within the world of contemporary art. As a result, while history is unlikely to be kind to his presidency, the man who once suffered the indignity of a poll branding him the most unpopular political leader in modern American history, is now finding favour as an artist.

Perhaps emboldened by the reception for his paintings, which ranged from gentle bemusement to tongue-in-cheek adulation from hipster website BuzzFeed, Bush decided to mount an exhibition containing more than two dozen of his painted portraits of world leaders at the George W Bush Presidential Center in Dallas.

The first image I looked for, inevitably, was that of Tony Blair. As an artist, Bush has earned a reputation for churning out kitsch images of dogs, including his beloved (and now dead) pet Scottish terrier, Barney. What would he make, then, of the man often characterised as “Bush’s poodle”? The answer, I am sad to report, is that Blair appears like a perfectly dignified statesman, if one with a noticeably receding hairline who has been positioned, inexplicably, off-centre towards the right of the image – a misguided pictorial decision that gives undue prominence to the distractingly bright background. I can’t help feeling that Bush missed a trick here.

As for the rest of the paintings, at the time of writing, it was only possible to inspect a selection of officially released photographs documenting the interior of the exhibition from afar. Still, several things were clear.

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Although the exhibition, The Art of Leadership, is subtitled “A President’s Personal Diplomacy”, the pictures themselves generally present only the head, neck and shoulders of each leader, in the manner of an official portrait photograph. They thus appear copied rather than produced either from life or from a recollection of a private meeting. Any air of intimacy, informality or insight is markedly absent: most of the leaders wear a suit and tie, or similarly formal clothes typical of the culture they represent, alongside the fixed smile of the politician’s public persona. Bush tries to brighten things up by presenting several of the leaders against backgrounds of flat colour ranging from green and yellow to turquoise, in a way that is reminiscent of paintings by the American Pop artist Alex Katz. (Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.) But this can’t hide the fact that these dreary and compositionally identical likenesses couldn’t feel more impersonal if they tried. Nothing here has the surprising interest or sense of uneasy psychological penetration of Bush’s bathroom self-portraits.

The one exception is Bush’s portrait of Putin, who has been given a grimacing, squished muzzle, and prominent rodent ears, against a purple background. There is something unconventional and compelling about this image, which has seemingly been informed by Bush’s study of Francis Bacon. Far from flattering the Russian autocrat, it suggests a strained, potentially bruising relationship between sitter and artist – offering a reminder that subtle foreign policy was never Bush’s strong suit. Yesterday, Bush was reported as saying that Putin had once insulted the diminutive stature of his pet dog, Barney. This portrait, then, is Bush’s revenge. It just goes to show: antagonise an artist, and he will disfigure you for eternity.